Network forwarding elements commonly have control and data plane components. The control plane component provides an interface for configuring the data plane component. The data plane component handles the forwarding of the data packets that the forwarding element receives. There are many situations where the data plane component of a forwarding element has to be reconfigured. For instance, the data plane component may need to be upgraded to utilize a new encapsulation method. The data plane components of a forwarding element are typically in an integrated circuit (IC). The users of the existing forwarding elements have to wait several years for the release of a new IC that supports the new encapsulation method.
As another example, the data plane component of the forwarding element may wedge. A cold reboot of the data plane component may take several seconds and cause a large impact to the incoming packet traffic. There are currently no practical ways of reconfiguring the data plane component of a forwarding element with minimal impact to the incoming traffic.